Reviews
Bernard Hughes
Perhaps 2021 was not the most propitious time to launch a new festival, but composer and conductor Josh Ballance did it anyway, and the High Barnet Chamber Music Festival has returned in 2022 – as it will, I hope, in 2023 and beyond. Still modestly proportioned, the programming doesn’t lack ambition, and I was particularly drawn to last night’s programme by the ensemble Mad Song, featuring a wealth of new and newish music.“Chamber music” is a term that conjures up polite string quartets and piano trios, and while the festival includes Mendelssohn and Beethoven, it also embraces Elizabeth Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Can a comedy have too many jokes? That may seem an odd question, but one that applies to this latest high-octane, eager-to-please outing by Richard Bean, which flies out of the hanger at such high velocity that it’s in danger of crashing before it leaves the runway.If the play is guilty of trying too hard, and is a tad one-dimensional, it’s also fair to say that once it breaks through the clouds and we’ve taken our seat belts off, Jack Absolute Flies Again does settle into a veritable hoot. With a skilled and hugely likeable cast, it’s genuinely funny and charming, spectacularly, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago.Jacopo Spirei’s production, with design by Madeleine Boyd, has just one basic set: it changes from Act One to Act Two by removing two evocative visual elements (a hearth and a panel of generally rustic appearance) and replacing them with geometrical and electrically dazzling shapes, and it has a binary contrast of costumes – ragged rebel Highlanders and sophisticated, techno-style royal loyalists.So, from the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Remember how, back in the summer of 2020, we all wondered if large-scale symphonies would be back in the repertoire any time soon? I pessimistically predicted a decade of slow orchestral reconstruction.Yet right at the beginning of the 2021-2 season, the Philharmonia kicked off with two Strauss blockbusters. The Proms, having made last-minute readjustments to the 2021 programme, had inserted Sibelius’s Second Symphony into a magnificent first night from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska. But only this year are the great visiting orchestras back - and how.You may question Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I’ve always been bemused by the American painter, Milton Avery. Not having seen enough of his paintings together, I couldn’t gauge if they are quirkily naive – lodged in a cul de sac aside from the mainstream – or hyper-sophisticated harbingers of things to come.The Royal Academy’s retrospective, the first of its kind in Europe, reveals that, in a way, he was both. He went from being an impressionist whose landscapes look positively 19th century to making glorious abstractions that anticipate the colour field paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. But it was a long haul.Avery was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Over the past few weeks, countless columns have been written about Nick Kyrgios, who lost in the Wimbledon final to Novak Djokovic. Who knows if the Australian will watch this illuminating documentary about the original “bad boy of tennis” to see how his own career may pan out?Barney Douglas's film – essentially a long-form interview with John McEnroe, interspersed with generous archive footage, contributions from family and friends including Billie Jean King, home movies and moody shots of the player-turned-commentator walking the streets of Douglaston in Queens, the New York neighbourhood Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch a Peter Morgan drama is to have a fly-on-the-wall’s perspective of modern history. Over the last two decades he has chronicled everything from David Frost’s bid to interview Richard Nixon to the disintegration in the relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.In his new play Patriots at the Almeida he takes one of the most potent political narratives of our time – the rise of Vladimir Putin – and refracts it through the life story of the brilliant, flamboyant, bullying oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Through the prism of Berezovsky’s tragedy we see how Putin goes from repressed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After the sensational reinvention of the England cricket team this summer, with their so-called “Bazball” technique, the second-best thing to have happened to the Summer Game is Freddie Flintoff’s new series.Here, the former dynamic all-rounder and hero of the 2005 Ashes series goes back to his roots in Preston to try to convince the local kids that cricket could be a game for them. The voice-over makes sure to hammer the point home with a sledgehammer: “Cricket is the most elitist sport in Britain.”The major obstacle is that if the local teens have even heard of cricket at all, they’ve Read more ...
David Nice
For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven”, is how Pier Paolo Pasolini, the centenary of whose birth we mark this year, defined his early experience of hearing the Siciliana movement of Bach’s First Violin Sonata (adding that he inclined to the fleshly). It provided the perfect epigraph to the four Ravenna Festival performances I attended this year, three of them as stunning as any hybrid event I’ve ever witnessed.The choice of return dates – regretfully missing out on Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" this year, though I did by chance Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Last weekend saw the long-awaited, post-Covid return of Birmingham’s urban festival of sonic strangeness, and yet again it was a time to wallow in the sounds of previously unknown or vaguely heard about artists, while trying not to melt as temperatures sent mercury levels into orbit.It may have been a bit of a struggle getting there through the pre-Commonwealth Games roadworks, but as it always is, it was an effort that was well-worth making – with audiences being treated to feral drum and bass, doom metal, twisted folk music and some seriously experimental weirdness, amongst much else. Read more ...
David Nice
After the long interval, as darkness falls, the screw turns in this Garsington revival more woundingly than any I can remember for Britten's most concentrated masterpiece. Evil chords, trills, cadenzas and silences from the 13 superb Philharmonia players conducted by Mark Wigglesworth duly terrorise; Verity Wingate as the Governess to two orphaned children in a house which seems haunted by their former elders really does seem possessed.If everyone has to work harder in the first act, audience included, that's the nature of the beautiful Garsington beast. True, ghosts can appear in broad Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For most Montrealers, their 10-day jazz festival (30 June - 9 July) is, as the new head of programming Maurin Auxéméry described it to me, a “free, all-you-can-eat musical buffet every night”. People head into the town centre to the Quartier des Spectacles in their thousands for the free events, from smaller free stages right up to the main Scène TD in the Place des Arts, which accommodates up to 60,000 people partying. Of about 350 events during the festival period, at least two-thirds had free admission.This was the festival’s 42nd edition and marked a comeback, putting large-scale events Read more ...